Feminist anthropology最新文献

Drawing on long-term anthropological research in Guatemala, the article examines the case of sexual and labor slavery in armed conflict known as ‘Sepur Zarco’. Focusing on the scene of selected court hearings related to events that took place in a military base near the village of Sepur Zarco, Izabal, between 1982 and 1986, the analysis focuses on ‘bodying forth’ (Das 2007), as a process of witnessing, materialization and subjectification that emerges in the declarations of the different parties, as they conjure up Dominga Cuc Coc, a local Maya Q'eqchi’ woman, on the riverbank washing army uniforms under duress, or as the body of the forensic exhumation. ‘Bodying forth’ is tied to performative forensic imaginaries and forensic aesthetics in the courtroom, the broader Guatemalan body politic, and beyond. It challenges the epistemological underpinnings of law and science to re-center the necessary differential and differentiated accounts of the witnesses and their appeals to justice.

This article illustrates how feminist analyses and insights have offered anthropology expansive ethnographic possibilities as it charts possible futures for doing more ethically and politically invested work that emerges from the lives and experiences of Black women and women in the Global South. It takes on the problematics of situatedness, difference, reflexivity, and writing about women's lives in the (feminist) anthropology of HIV/AIDS to challenge the omission and misrepresentation of multiple-voiced subjects and non-European experiences as well as the elided racial and gendered experiences of HIV/AIDS. I situate myself within the decolonial turn and the scholarly and political genealogies of Black feminist anthropology to explore the challenges and opportunities of feminist ethnography in the era of “the end of AIDS.” Using ethnographic work on the experiences of HIV-positive women in Kingston, Jamaica, conducted between 2015 and 2018, I foreground the life and death of Shanna, a mother of four to argue that the lives and afterlives of HIV-positive Black Caribbean women expand the heterogeneous inheritances of feminist ethnography by offering insights on how to envision futures that are attentive to cross-cultural experiences, embodied realities, social location, and structural condition. As I reconsider my own relationship to feminist ethnography and anthropology, I ask: How can (Black) feminist ethnography grapple with the ethics around HIV/AIDS and death while addressing the long-standing problematic within feminist anthropology of relating to subjects in the field and writing about evolving subjectivities?

There is growing scholarly and public attention toward the stark racial disparities in birth outcomes in the US. To lower disparate rates of Indigenous and Black infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates, public and elected officials have proposed extending comprehensive prenatal care and medical resources and addressing racial biases in healthcare delivery. These efforts aim to bring minoritized and marginalized peoples and communities “into the fold.” In this essay, I consider the potential dangers of such contemporary efforts by critically analyzing historical initiatives to address birth outcomes and reproductive health in Indigenous communities. By foregrounding settler colonial social orders and their links to settler capitalism, I show how historical efforts to bring Indigenous peoples “into the fold” jeopardized Indigenous birth and reproductive capacities, while also upholding heteropatriarchal notions of sexuality, family, and racial difference.

This article explores how affect shaped frontline workers’ efforts to address gender inequality in Jaipur, the capital of the Indian state of Rajasthan. Counselors, frontline workers who helped women facing violence seek legal and social support, used the term himmat, courage/daring, to criticize the behavior of men and to celebrate the bravery of women. In counseling interactions, activist writing, and everyday speech, people used the word himmat to describe how affect might be marshaled for social transformation. I argue that himmat animates social movements addressing inequality, simultaneously serving as a felt diagnostic of hierarchy and a prompt to act against that hierarchy. Phenomena such as himmat are what I call affective fulcrums. A fulcrum both generates and limits motion. As an affective fulcrum, himmat channels affect that gains energy from relations shaped by a grid of inequality, including gender inequality. Yet it also creates movement around and within those unequal relations. Using himmat as an example of an affective fulcrum, I argue that attention to the role of affect in women's rights organizations can help us better analyze how inequality grounds efforts for change even as it allows for movement towards transformation.

Based on ethnographic research with transgender Latinas in Chicago, this article answers Susana Narotzky and Niko Besnier's (2014) invitation to think “economy otherwise.” I contend that in order to think “economy otherwise” we must think it queerly, and attend to feminist ways money animates possibilities beyond racist-cisgenderism. I bring together economic anthropology, feminist anthropology, and queer of color critique to queer money, specifically money earned from sexual labor performed by transgender Latinas. An ethnographic examination of trans Latina sex workers’ lives reveals that money accessed through sexual labor is assigned a number of queer and contested meanings. Its use is based in feminist ethics that eschew dominant economic logics in favor of building relations of care. It enables the creation of transgender bodies, and the development of queer networks of care with biological and chosen kin, in the U.S. and beyond. Trans Latinas, then, use money from sex work to support trans Latina ways of being that exceed the racist-cisgenderism. Sometimes, however, their uses of money reinforce racist-cisgenderism. I argue that the women's fraught uses of money reveal the complex intersections that sustain racist-cisgenderism, and how they are experienced and negotiated in people's everyday lives.

This article situates random public encounters in fieldwork as critical ethnographic “shadowboxing” (James 1999) moments shaping Black queer feminisms for anthropology. Based in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, I explore the multiangular effects of an impromptu encounter with a gynecologist within the context of the International Women's Day march in 2013. This article maps how my Black queer feminist lens renders visible the rooted mechanisms of power and subsequent erasures of Black women's agency in silence and social action. I rethink how discovery and evidence emerge as “radical data” to frame how Black female bodies become shadows within institutional spaces. It challenges us to boldly call out the radical data that resides beyond the data itself. I engage the scholarship of Black queer and Black feminist scholars as a call for more Black queer feminist praise songs.

Every year in Haiti and its diaspora, the Lenten and Vodou festivals of Rara occur through Easter Sunday. In this article, I argue that religious performances, such as Rara, are critical sites of Black women's social and economic empowerment. In particular, the women performers of Rara or the queens use Rara to empower themselves. Based on long-term ethnographic research in Haiti, I attend to the way Black women transform play and Black religious expression into labor or what I call spiritual play-labor. This concept builds on the works of Robin D.G. Kelley's (1997) and Oneka LaBennett's (2011) in which they attend to the ways that Black youth turn play and Black cultural expression into labor. I use Spiritual play-labor as an analytic to explore the ways that Haitian women turn spiritual performances and Rara's carnivalesque play into labor that is compensated. The queen's reframing of their performance as labor relies upon their understanding of chalè or heat in which Black women's beauty and bodily work are central. Situating myself within the field of Black feminist anthropology, I explore my role as a feminist ethnographer in advocating with the queens to reframe their spiritual play into labor.

In this introduction to the special issue on Cite Black Women, Christen Smith describes the conditions of invisibility, exclusion, and silencing of Black women scholars in anthropology. Charting genealogical and biographical confluences, she describes the formation of the Cite Black Women collective, and the interventions imagined by the contributors to this special issue.